by Eli Brown
These, then, are the stories the wicked tell themselves that they may sleep.
The ending prompted a clamor of cheers and applause, which lasted only until the real Mabbot yelled from her chair, “Lies! Defamation!” The ship went silent. The actors, clutching their wigs to their chests, stood pale and attentive. Mabbot rose and turned her terrible visage upon the crowd. She drew her pistol and said, “That is not how I dance. I dance like this!” Shooting her pistols at the sky, Captain Mabbot performed a jig of her own, her light hops punctuated by the clopping of her boots. Mr. Apples joined her, his false bosom bouncing. The crew erupted in cheers, and music played, and the bacchanal continued well into the night. From my chamber, even now, I can hear hedonism galloping to and fro above me.
Could it be true that Mabbot had worked for Ramsey—was he, even as he ate my sauces, waging hidden wars against foreign competitors? It would mean Mabbot and I had been paid from the same purse. Even I, whom Ramsey called “an Englishman with a French tongue,” cannot believe the world is that muddied. I never considered my French apprenticeship to be unpatriotic. What skills I learned I used to the benefit of England. And besides, though despots may whip the world to war, a brioche did not sail against Trafalgar. Cathedrals were never shelled with chèvre. The one exception to this rule is the boiled cabbage I encountered in the monasteries, which is a weapon in a bowl. The proper way to treat a cabbage leaf, of course, is to blanch it ever so briefly, wrap it around a piece of thinly sliced ham, and dip it in hollandaise.
Sunday, September 5
If I had needed further confirmation of the folly of sailing, I found it today.
Nothing written, nor painted, nor sung by a poet, could have prepared me for the violence of the southern African seas. The sailors call the wind there the “Roaring Forties,” and use it to fling their ships around the cape and into the Indian Ocean. If ever a man was stricken with hubris, those waters hold the cure. With no cloud in the sky, the waves, which the men call “greybeards,” rose to the height of the topmasts and played with our ship like it was a child’s toy. The shock of seeing walls of water circling the Rose would have sent me cowering below, if my vomiting hadn’t prevented it. I hung from the railing like a sausage as the deck dropped out from under me. Again and again we crested those mountains to rush headlong into the indigo valleys. Only by Mr. Apples’s hails to the men on the yards and the swift hands of the helmsman did we survive.
So we are cutting foam now toward Cochin China, for Mabbot has an ally there she wishes to recruit before reaching our ultimate destination: Macau. There we will meet, at last, the Fox—we are closer than ever to the goal that has preoccupied her for years. What exactly the redheaded fiends want from each other, whether or not we will make it that far, and what may happen when we finally arrive, God only knows.
The papers would have us believe that Mabbot is, like some mythic squid, a peril that rises from the deep at random to pull ships down, a singular and senseless hazard. In fact she is but one character in a convoluted tragedy whose entire cast seems to be comprised of villains. Even as we hunt the Fox, we are hunted by the navy and Laroche, who are in turn also after the Fox for undermining trade in the ports of China. The Flying Rose is a link in a chain of enmity that manacles the entire globe.
Monday, September 6
Yesterday, when the Rose finally emerged from those godforsaken seas, having rounded the cape, I rose, still queasy, to pray for myself and all lost souls. We were jibing with the wind now, the southeast trades carrying us swiftly north. The men were slung like cats on the yardarms, exhausted.
I embarked on bread from my yeast batter, which, through daily feedings of flour, had fully matured into a tumescent mound, sighing contentedly when poked. Bread necessitated shoring up the primitive oven of brick and iron grates. Despite the great promise of the little iron stove hauled from the Pendleton ship, I still cannot use it. I have told Mabbot that I need someplace to set it up, there is no room in Conrad’s galley, and, further, I will need a chimney to vent the smoke. Mabbot was in a sour mood when I approached her about the matter—she said, “You expect me to make you a second galley?”
“If you want proper nourishment, a proper kitchen is needed,” I said.
She huffed and our conversation was over. So I’ve been forced to become a bricklayer as well.
Conrad talked at the back of my head as I worked, his syphilitic breath moistening my neck.
“Don’t know hunger till ya been adrift a fortnight on a ten-foot longboat with eight other men. Don’t know hunger till you’ve stewed yer own belt in brine an’ ate it an’ liked it. That is hunger…”
Ignoring his rants did not deter him in the slightest, but at least he didn’t seem to take offense. Not even when I drowned out his prattle by cracking walnuts with my boot heels.
The weevil-tainted dough didn’t rise as much in baking as I had hoped, but the bread was hearty enough, enlivened by the anise seeds and walnuts, and would serve my purposes.
“Rare honor to enjoy the cabin the way you have,” Conrad prattled on. “Well, you must’ve charmed her, I guess. But soon enough we’ll all be living the life of steak and cherries once we get our share of the Fox’s treasure…”
On my way to and from the larder, I passed the men repairing sails after the depredations of the Roaring Forties, and heard this gossip regarding our notorious Brass Fox: “He’s no simple man. You heard the prison guards. Fox went right through the prison walls. Which of you seen a man what can do that? Clear as my face that the Fox is Satan’s own bastard. Sired on a corpse and raised by witches. He’s searching out the pieces of the true cross with which to unlock the gates of hell and bring it ’pon the earth.”
It’s evident that a pirate has no more truth in him than a goose has milk. Mabbot might actually spread these wild rumors herself, for it keeps the crew from the notion that has begun to push into my mind like a stubborn weed: that what fuels her fanatical hunt is neither treasure, nor revenge, nor great schemes of conquest, but something far more menacing, the single-minded urgency of a mother lion searching for her lost cub.
I saw Joshua trading gestures with the man on the crow’s nest and had to admit that in certain circumstances it is an elegant improvement over hollering oneself hoarse. There are others on this ship, their hearing blasted by cannon retort, who use Joshua’s signs to communicate. In fact everyone here knows at least some of the boy’s hand language and can express the basic elements of this life—ship, rope, rock, gun, wind, wine, and land—in this silent method. The boy came to me to learn reading and writing but, after all, what are his signs if not a writing on the air?—and more eloquent for the dramatic facility of the face, which can deliver meaning better than any punctuation. I have, until now, considered his method of communication primitive. I should have known better. The boy is surrounded by brutes and yet surpasses them in all respects. I have been too stern a schoolmaster. It seems I have more amends to make.
Encouraged by my meager success with the oven, I moved to the deck to build, from pots and grills, a smoker.
The eel I handled thus: After cleaning it, I rubbed salt and a little honey into the body cavity and coiled it on the grill of the improvised smoker above a small pile of red-hot embers. These coals I covered with a handful of steeped tea leaves. The lid I left slightly ajar and returned every ten minutes to add more coals or tea until, with the daylight waning, the eel was finally done. The honey had caramelized into the meat, which came easily from the bones. As for the smoke: when one has been on the road, tired and rained on, and catches, long before seeing any sign of a house, the faint but unmistakable odor of a chimney and with it the promise of drying off next to a fire—that is the feeling that the tea smoke imparts, not the actual arrival but the comforting nearness of home.
I took the smoked eel to the galley and was interrupted there by Mabbot, who arrived to watch me cook. She said not a word but leaned in the doorway, simply observing me.
&nbs
p; In general protest, I greeted her not, nor made conversation of any sort, pretending I hadn’t seen her. But she was not deterred and stared with great interest at my every movement.
Never had an employer interfered so. Even Ramsey, who fancied himself an amateur cook, had never examined my every move thus. She seemed to be noting the exact angle of my wrist as I chopped, the strength of my grip as I kneaded.
Ignoring her as best I could, I boned the herring, then boiled and mashed it together with garlic, rosemary, salted anchovies, and a handful of white beans.
I knew then what a mouse must feel with a cat nearby. Indeed I felt the long whiskers of her gaze against the nape of my neck. It seemed the heat from Conrad’s hearth was increasing, and I began to sweat profusely.
At last, when I could no longer stand her silent scrutiny, I turned and barked, “What is it, then?”
Mabbot chuckled and, after an infuriating silence, said casually, “I saw Ladislav Dussek perform when he was in London. I had good seats. Very close. I could see even the velvet nap of his cravat. Every one of the improvements he had made on his piano are now de rigueur for any serious piano maker. The man was an innovator, a genius. He bent the very wood to the will of the music.”
“But what is your point?”
“All his imagination, his technical facility, his vision, what would it be if he could not stand to be watched?”
With this she walked away. I muttered, “Did the man play sonatas on a barrel of moldy flour?” As I heard her boots moving away on the deck, I let my voice rise till I was yelling at the sky: “Was he performing on cheap tin pots?” I slammed the pots together. “They can’t take heat! I might as well be boiling beans in wicker!”
It felt good to vent my frustration thus. But even an hour later I could still feel the tickle of her gaze upon my back.
Though I would have preferred to have an egg for the noodle dough, I made do with the right ratio of water and lard, kneading it long enough to keep it together but not so long as to toughen it.
On a ship it is hard to distinguish desperation from genius, but I must congratulate myself for today’s resourcefulness. While I was searching vainly for a rolling pin, it occurred to me to try a cannonball. I have to admit it works well enough for pirate pasta.
I bravely investigated the mysterious cheese in the pantry. The crust of each fist-sized ball was hard, grey, and bland, but toward the center the cheese had aged to a fine white crumble with threading dark veins. The smell was sharp and bodily, somewhere between Stilton and Dorset Vinny. My best guess was that it was sheep’s milk, and it would serve my purposes quite well. I decided to call it Pilfered Blue.
Well after sunset on Sunday night, my tray laden, I approached Mabbot’s cabin and stopped, hearing voices inside: Mr. Apples and the captain in a heated conversation. Though I didn’t follow it entirely, they seemed to be discussing preparations for Macau.
“I want to try this diviner,” Mabbot said.
“Thought you despised witches,” Mr. Apples grunted.
“I despise charlatans. But this woman doesn’t err. I’ve used her before. Does it not feel like a fool’s errand that he has simply invited us to Macau? I want to be sure we’re not wasting our time. Braga knows the smuggling tunnels around the Pearl River, but he doesn’t know what to expect in San Lazaro.”
“But Laroche is about, almost certain, Cap’m. He is somewhere in these seas guarding the tea routes. They’ll miss the Patience soon. For all we know, they’ve found the Fox themselves. Bait for a hook.”
“I’ve no choice but to bite,” Mabbot said.
“Could wait until the season is over, hide out for a patch, give the men a spell—they love beach revels. They’re shit-brained for mangoes. Then, when Laroche is tired, we’ll head in swift and find the Fox.”
“We cannot slow now—we’ve come so close. By minutes and hairs we’ve missed him. Time to redouble our efforts.”
“I’m only saying, Cap’m, that the men are tired, and now they’ve got silver burning their pockets, itchin’ to spend a little.”
“They’ll have plenty of time to buy whores and chocolate once I’ve found my Fox.”
11
ONE WOMAN’S WAR
In which Mabbot reveals herself
There was a heavy silence, and worried that they might sense my presence, I knocked. The door was opened by Mabbot herself. Mr. Apples replaced the maps in the chart cupboard, locked it, and then disappeared. I set the platter upon the table and stood silent while Joshua brought the china and candelabra. I helped him set the table for two, smiling at him all the while, but he ignored me entirely, leaving as soon as the places were set.
It was then that serendipity and my own oafishness brought us closer to understanding the Fox’s plans. While setting the table, I spotted a new pattern on the bed: clusters of pink and tan that, upon closer inspection, revealed themselves to be poppies woven into a Turkish rug. Mabbot saw my eyes linger. “Do you fancy it?” she asked. “It’s one of the trifles recovered at the prison. A variation of prayer carpet, perhaps. Quite fine, but I have more underfoot than I know what to do with.”
“It would make my cell warmer, that’s sure,” I said, stepping closer. “It seems nice and thick. I thought for a moment it was a map. It’s so dim in here.”
At this Mabbot looked at me as one looks at a friend long missed. “A map?”
“I thought this blue strip was a sea, and these green humps, hills. The blossoms could be … of course, I see now that it’s only flowers.”
“How silly of you.” A moment passed as she stared dreamily at the rug. Then she screamed, “Apples!”
A moment later her faithful second-in-command burst into the room with a knife drawn for blood. Mabbot, disregarding the alarm she had invoked, pulled him by the arm to the bed and patted the rug. “Cork-brained Wedge thought this elegant carpet was, can you imagine, a map.”
Mr. Apples chuckled. “And a Bible is salad to a goat.”
Mabbot traced her finger along the patterns of the rug and said, “Right. But then, if we pretended this was, in fact, a map, what might it tell us?” He studied the flowers, then blinked at Mabbot in surprise. The two pirates looked at each other with growing pleasure. “These vines and these blossoms—”
“Tunnels and chambers! That clever bastard.”
“It’s his warren under the Pendleton warehouses. But I’m hungry,” said Mabbot. “Wedge has been working all day on whatever succulence he has hidden here. Draft a copy of the rug and show it to old Pete, and to Braga. No one else sees it.”
“Yes, Cap’m.” And with that Mr. Apples rolled the rug up and whisked it out the door. Mabbot slapped me on the back and said, “I knew you’d prove useful, Wedge. I just didn’t know how very.”
“I guess I’ll not be getting that rug to warm my floor.”
“Remember all those times I didn’t kill you? And coming about to pull you from the water after your little swim?”
“Fair enough.”
“Oh, don’t pout. I’ll get you a damned rug.” She glanced about and laid her hand upon a dog-eared book. “And here, it’s a prison Bible, handwritten. Warden said it belonged to the Fox, but my boy is hardly God-fearing. I know you like that sort of thing.”
She handed me the leather-bound book, which, with a quick perusal, I could see was only a fragment of the New Testament, Mark or Luke perhaps. I was touched by the humble manufacture; I could imagine a prisoner coming to terms with his wickedness by writing the word of God out, letter by letter, in some damp cell. There are many roads to salvation.
Mabbot and I, in our strange ritual, sat quietly before touching the victuals. She was still brooding. I took the moment to say grace, softly, aloud. She glared at me with storm-water eyes. Her hair was still in braids, and her brow and neck were exposed, browned from the sun and densely freckled. Those freckles were hypnotic in the candlelight, trembling where her pulse danced, cinnamon shaken into a bowl of milk.
I removed the pot I used for a lid to reveal the meal.
“Three courses,” I announced. “Herring pâté with rosemary on walnut bread. Tea-smoked eel ravioli seared with caramelized garlic and bay leaf. And as touche finale, rum-poached figs stuffed with Pilfered Blue cheese and drizzled with honey.”
Slowly, begrudgingly, a smile softened her features. She passed her nose over each, inhaling deeply, before spooning the glistening ravioli onto her plate. We ate without speaking. It was gratifying to do away with courses and take each taste as it called to me, every so often sipping wine to clean my tongue.
Blotting her lips with a silk damask napkin, she said, “My dear, you’ve proven yourself again. What do you think about while you chop and knead? Help me forget this ship for a minute.”
The ravioli slid voluptuously about the plate, attended by the firefly aromas of bay leaf and garlic. Their skins were tender between the teeth, yielding at the last moment to an eddy of smoked eel. I chewed for a moment before answering.
“I have begun to think of the mouth as a temple, of the kind that Adam and Eve might have made in a cave. The temple is open on both ends. On one side is the known world, lit by the sun and in the order nature and man have designed. On the other end is darkness and transformation. Between these poles of birth and death, serenity and insanity, lies taste.
“It is our greatest grace, a gift reserved for men alone. A dog sups on gutter filth, and a horse eats grass; they have tongues yet do not taste. Taste is the sense that was most defiled by the transgression of the forbidden fruit; it was this betrayal of the most intimate of the senses that so angered the Lord and sent us wandering out here.”